To What Extent Do You Agree with the View That Pla

To What Extent Do You Agree with the View That Pla

There is a famous statement that"there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry". Well Plato is definitely a person who believes in it. He lived at a time where his city was in disaster after the Peloponnesian war and this helped him to contribute his ability in philosophy as well as literary theories. All his literary theories are influenced by his philosophy.

Plato was very critical about the knowledge of the poets in is time. He lived in a critical time where people needed good guidance. People tend to look up to the poets because they water the desires of human feelings. This attracted people towards poets. This is a dangerous situation if the poets do not know what they should bring forward through their poetry. Plato simply thought that poets write while they are in a trance possessed by Muse the goddess of art and conveying Muse' ideas through poetry. These ideas poets presented were the weak side of human nature; "our emotions are watered the withered". Plato reveals two contradictory aspects of poets' knowledge. He says poets are responsible for what they write and also they are not responsible for what they write because they are writing poetry in a trance. Homer was one of the poets whom people would believe in any time. Homer basically created the culture of the Greeks. The heroes, the gods, the underworld and war were all Homers creations. According to Plato these are imaginations of Homer. Plato blames Homer for giving the wrong idea of gods and goddesses. According to Plato even if gods have defects they should be created as perfect idols so people would tend to imitate the right way of life. As stated by the Stafford Encyclopedia of Philosophy "To interpret Homer well, we have to understand what Homer said; to do that, and to support our judgment that he spoke superlatively well, we have to understand the subject matter about which Homer speaks (just as we would in, say, evaluating someone's pronouncements about health)....